Folke Anders Adrian Boberg

Jönköping and Moody

Folke Anders Adrian Boberg (鲍伯格) was born in 1896 in Kisa (基萨), Östergötland, Sweden. He prepared thoroughly for missionary work: from 1919 he trained for two years at the Bible school of the Swedish Alliance Mission in Jönköping, and in 1921–1922 he went to the United States for further study at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Two years in Sweden, then a year in America, and in the autumn of 1922 he set out for China.

Thirty Years in Inner Mongolia

In 1922 he arrived in Inner Mongolia as a missionary of the Swedish Pentecostal Church, and he worked there until 1951, nearly thirty years. At the time Inner Mongolia was quite marginal in the missionary landscape of China: the land was vast and thinly populated, the herders moved in search of water and grass, and the language was utterly different from that of the Han regions. There he did two things side by side: preaching the gospel, and compiling a dictionary.

The Three-Volume Mongolian-English Dictionary

The fruit of his many years of labour was the three-volume Mongolian-English Dictionary, published in 1954. The dictionary was highly regarded by scholars, and its publication was funded by several Swedish foundations, among them the Längman Cultural Foundation. For a Pentecostal missionary, compiling a large bilingual dictionary was not part of his ordinary duties; but at a time when Mongolian-language resources were extremely scarce, the value of such a reference work went far beyond mission itself.

Mongolia for Swedish Readers

Besides the dictionary, he wrote several books about Mongolia in Swedish: Med fridsbudskapet till Mongoliet (With the Message of Peace to Mongolia, 1931), Bland pilgrimer i Djingis Khans land (Among Pilgrims in the Land of Genghis Khan, 1945), and Mongolia as a Mission Field. These books brought the grasslands, felt tents, lama temples and the daily life of herders to readers far away in northern Europe.

After He Left

In 1951 he ended his work in Inner Mongolia, nearly thirty years after he first arrived. He died in 1987 at the age of ninety-one. Among the people in this database, Inner Mongolia is an almost blank region: apart from James Gilmour, "the Apostle of Mongolia," and Percy Mather (马尔昌), who compiled Manchu-Mongolian dictionaries, there is only this Swede, who spent thirty years on the grasslands and left behind a three-volume dictionary.